enactivism

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

A radical approach to cognitive science holding that cognition is not the representation of a pre-given world inside the head, but the enactment of a world through the organism's dynamic sensorimotor coupling with its environment; the mind is something organisms do rather than something they have

History and origin

Introduced by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch in 'The Embodied Mind' (1991); draws on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and autopoiesis theory (Varela and Maturana)

Examples

• Enactivism argues that colour is not a property of objects or of the brain, but arises in the interaction between organism and environment.
• Enactivism is part of the broader '4E' movement in cognitive science: embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended cognition.

Synonyms: enactive cognition, sensorimotor theory of consciousness, enacted cognition